Major Incident – Text Alerts (AKA ITSM Alerts)#

One of the most important things that the Operations Support Team does is to communicate information about service affecting incidents to the business, key stakeholders and FT Technology as a whole.

Nowadays we do this via Status Page but we do have the option to send text alerts to technology senior management and the senior stakeholders for newspaper production, FT.com and security related matters.

What is a text alert also known as an ITSM Alert?#

An ITSM Alert is a text message that we generally issue to FT Technology Management when a major incident is underway.

We tend to reserve sending ITSM alerts for only the most critical types of major incidents, recent examples would be the Dyn DNS Issue that took down FT.com and recent problems with getting the pages out to the print sites causing delays with newspaper production.

If an incident is causing widespread impact and it’s either not under control or it’s the sort of thing senior people will want to know about then send one out.

Why do they work so well?#

People are very busy so they act as a direct notification that something significant is happening, allowing people to become involved or to follow updates on Slack.

It not feasible to be expect people to be looking at Slack or email 24×7 so a text alert is an un-intrusive way of getting people’s attention, it ensures that they are aware of something they might want to know about is happening.

More information?#

If you would like more information or would like to receive our text alerts please let us know.